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Urban Renewal 177 177 9 Urban Renewal “The pattern of destroying and building anew as occurred at the Surabaya Mall site, and in Jakarta, is suicide.” (Johan Silas, Surabaya Post, 11 Aug. 1993) By 2003, Jl. Dinoyo had lost most of the street vendors, scrap pickers and becak drivers that had crammed the roadside during the economic crisis of 1997–98. The entry to Alley Nine was no longer cluttered with awaiting becaks, and only one small coffee stall was left standing at the busy intersection where the BAT Bridge joined Jl. Dinoyo. Behind this stall, under the shade of a tree near the riverbank , a solitary scrap picker sorted through a bundle of scrap. About a kilometre farther north along Jl. Dinoyo, a street-side market near the Widya Mandala University was to be demolished after the police had ordered its stall owners to relocate to the nearby Keputran market in accordance with a municipal government plan to close the city’s 22 smallest markets (Kompas Online, 4 Feb. 2003). This strip of road formed the eastern border of Dinoyo from the bridge to the university. In 2003, through its lonely street stall and scrap picker, it also formed a striking contrast with the bustling informal economy that five years earlier had occupied its edges. The eradication of street vendors along Jl. Dinoyo was part of a municipal campaign to clean up public spaces. The campaign gained pace in the months leading up to the national elections of October 2004. In May the police had started demolishing squatter shacks along the Kali Mas, and in June the municipal government signed an agreement with the political parties to keep demonstrations off the main streets and restricted to between 9 a.m. and 4 p.m. each day 178 Surabaya, 1945–2010 (Kompas, 26 May 2004; Java Post Online, 1 June 2004). Public order continued to tighten as the national election campaign of 2004 gave way to the municipal election campaign of 2005. By the time the municipal elections were over in June 2005, Surabaya had experienced almost two years of continued election campaigning. The number of police deployed along the streets had doubled to almost 7,000, and the police chief proudly claimed that “all streets were safe with not even the slightest ripple of disorder”. According to him, this newfound orderliness meant that Surabaya’s population had matured into an “adult” body politic (Java Post Online, 29 June 2005). The long election campaign had laid the foundations for an all-out offensive against urban disorder that was to become a hallmark of the term of Mayor Bambang Dwi Hartono.1 Another feature of Bambang’s term was the steady growth in mall construction. By 2008 there were 16 malls in Surabaya, with five more under construction. According to a concerned member of the municipal parliament, this number was excessive. He claimed that there should be only one mall per 500,000 people, so that only five or six malls would be enough for Surabaya’s population of 3.2 million. In late 2007, another member of the municipal parliament made a hopeless call for the city council to stop issuing building licences for the construction of malls, complaining that “Surabaya is crowded by malls and its people are fed up with them” (Kompas, 12 Sept. 2007; Radar Surabaya, 17 Sept. 2007). Although critics attributed Surabaya’s boom in mall construction to the mayor, it was part of a nationwide trend. Between 1998 and 2005, a fourfold increase in supermarkets and even bigger hypermarkets had taken place in Indonesia, where regulations on transnational shopping centres were the least stringent in Southeast Asia 1 From 2000 to 2002, Bambang Dwi Hartono was the deputy to Mayor Sunarto Sumoprawiro. When the latter died in 2002, Bambang became interim mayor until he was elected mayor in the 2005 municipal elections. He served until the end of his term in 2010, unable to run for another term due to a 2007 regulation restricting mayors to a maximum of two terms. In the 2010 municipal elections he kept a hold on power when he was elected deputy to Indonesia’s first female mayor, Tri Rismaharini. They ran together as the vice-mayoral and mayoral candidates of the PDI-P political party, Bambang’s party since his time in office (Java Post Online, 29 June 2005; Jakarta Post, 8 May 2010, 29 Sept. 2010; Java Post, 27 Oct. 2010). [18.226.187.24...

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